The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

7. Anna

The countryside unspooled in every direction around her: the house overlooked the valley below it. Grids and stripes of fields crazy-paved in a spectrum of greens, red tiled roofs, and avenues of trees—all of it lay before the house like a rug in front of a fireplace, and it existed in a permanent chatty buzz of crickets and far-off, hee-hawing donkeys.

Thank God we’re here. Anna cupped her hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the low-hanging and insistent sun and surveyed the site—the venue, as they’d been referring to it for so long. Now, stripped of the wedding, it was just a place again. But what a spot! High soaring birds, their wings open like books, flew across the sky as she took in the view. An appreciative sigh caught in her throat—not only from the dusty car journey but also because, as she relaxed properly for the first time since Sonny had been born, she felt tears of relief spring to her eyes.

I’ll be a different person by the time we leave—one who has infinite patience with her husband and can balance work and a child without feeling guilty about either.

Sweating slightly and anticipating the moment when she’d be able to swap her clothes for swimwear, Anna strode toward the wooden front door within its Gothic archway, solid and dotted with fortifying lead pins. The metal ring handle was sun-warmed in her palm and the latch squealed as she lifted it, but the door swung open smoothly into the château’s main room—the Great Hall, a tennis court in length or more.

“Oh my God,” Anna breathed, raising one hand to her chest as she looked around. “Effie!” She called her friend’s name without taking her eyes off the scene in front of her—and again, louder: “Effie!”

Anna heard the scuffing of trainers and the crunching of gravel; the noise stopped as their owner came to a pause behind her. The long room in front of them was dim after the brightness of the garden, and it took a moment for Effie’s eyes to adjust. But, eventually, there was the interior, laid out like a banquet before them.

“Ohhhh fuck.” Effie’s words were low and slow. She brought her hand to her forehead in a subconscious mirroring of Anna’s pose. “Oh dear.”

Golden rays bounced off the glassware, cutlery, and lanterns lined up on the pair of long tables in front of the two women. On a wooden trestle near the hearth stood an impossibly white, three-tiered cake decorated with dewy yellow roses and freshly foraged curlicues of ivy.

At the other end of the room was another sturdy medieval fireplace the height of a grown man, with a pair of crossed swords pinned on the chimney breast above it. The hammerbeam roof—a much-vaunted original feature that was mentioned countless times on the website, as Anna recalled—was made of dark timber, but light streamed in from the windows that looked out onto the courtyard.

Set at the bottom of a U-shaped quad, the Hall opened out through a pair of double doors onto a lavender-edged terrace. Beyond, the vista spread itself languidly like a diva across a piano, the sky vast and empty. The terrace, however, was busy with chairs—the wooden folding sort, arranged into rows that gazed back at the house as though filled with an expectant crowd.

Spotlit in the fiery sun hung a garlanded archway above the doorway, a trellis wreathed in lush flowers and dripping vines. And in front of that—at the top of a short flight of steps down onto the patio—was a small stand. An altar, if they were calling a spade a spade, as Anna always preferred to. On top of it lay a thick bound book with vellum pages, and on top of that were two small hoops, glinting in the afternoon sun.

“Well, bloody hell,” said Steve as he sauntered up behind them to gaze in as well. “That’s what I call a welcome.”

“It isn’t a sodding welcome, Steve, you idiot,” Anna spat.

The venom that she thought she’d left at home with her barrister’s gown and childcare duties but that had apparently been bubbling away just below the surface the whole time boiled over once again. She realized she was holding the doorframe so tightly her knuckles had turned white.

“It’s Lizzie’s wedding,” Effie said, finishing the horrified train of thought for her.

8. Effie

There was no time to hide what the Hall held as the woman who was supposed to have been the center of its attentions turned from the valley view toward the others at its doors.

“Don’t wait for me to start exploring!” Lizzie called, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun as she strode back from the ridge’s edge to join them.

“Lizbet, it, er, looks like they might not have got the message,” Anna called, attempting a warning before Lizzie reached them, but it only served to increase the other woman’s curiosity—and her pace.

Lizzie’s manner since climbing out of the car had been what Effie had silently registered as contemplative. Her face was clouded with the poignancy of arriving at the venue she would have left as a wife, but Lizzie’s features had, like everyone’s, lit up as the beauty of the estate—its harmonious setting, ancien régime charm, and easy balance of the rustic and the elegant—had dawned on them. Now, as she saw her friends gathered at the entrance of the Hall, uncertainty settled into the crease of her brow again and a question formed on her lips.

Before she could ask it, there came the purr of an engine from the direction of the road and another car joined theirs on the gravel. As they watched, Charlie and Iso climbed out and emptied its trunk, the former carrying a businessman’s hard-cased silver carry-on in one hand and an expensive Scotch-grain holdall in chocolate-brown leather in the other.

The perfect couple right down to their